Crossword puzzles are primarily intended as play for a single person, pitting the player's vocabulary skills against a prearranged list of word clues, the answers to which are written in vertical columns or horizontal rows of empty squares connected by black squares to form a matrix.
While the entertainment and educational value of the game is universally acknowledged, the crossword puzzle is not intended to be played by more than one player, offering little entertainment value as a group activity.
For this reason, games based on solving crossword puzzles but adapted for group play, have generally been commercially successful, the game of "Scrabble" by Selchow and Righter being the best known example. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,106,773 and 4,179,126 issued to Coefield are typical. Here, a crossword puzzle is shared by two persons, using colored pencils to write the letters into the puzzle, each player having a pencil of different color to simplify scorekeeping. U.S. Pat. No. 4,205,852 issued to Wayman discloses a system and game apparatus for creating crossword puzzles which can be played by several players.
These patents or known prior uses teach and disclose various types of crossword puzzle games of various sorts and various manufactures, and the like, as well as methods of their construction; but none of them, whether taken singly or in combination, disclose the specific details of the combination of the invention in such a way as to bear upon the claims of the present invention.